Suchergebnisse

National self-determination and the United Nations are modern concepts of political thought. Of the two the first is older and has struck much stronger roots. Its origin can be traced back to the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter gained recognition only in the period of the First World War. Both owe their conceptual frame and their ideological content to modem Western civilization, above all to Anglo-American thought. Yet the two concepts are to a degree contradictory: the United Nations envisages an international or supranational order at a time when nationalism—the insistence on national independence, self-determination, and self-expression as supreme political values and emotional guides—has for the first time in history become a world-wide phenomenon.

The age of nationalism offers us many examples which prove that affinities in descent or language have no influence on the formation of modern nations or on their political ideas. Switzerland is only one of several Germanic lands which developed a nationalism resembling much more closely that of England rather than that of Germany. The case of the Low Countries is similar. Both were until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries politically and historically a part of the German Empire. Both grew into separate nations in border regions where Germanic and Latin civilizations have met since the beginning of European history. Both gained their national character by a process of intellectual and political emancipation from Germany. The Dutch historian, Jan Huizinga, affirmed in Berlin at the beginning of 1933 in a lecture on the Netherlands as mediator between Western and Central Europe that "Our whole history as a people and a state is, with a few exceptions, Western European history. Our relations with the West have conditioned our independence as a people and as a state. Be it as friends, be it as enemies, France and England were our teachers. The Netherlands have significance and a meaningful place only as a territory oriented toward the West."

The meaning and implications of the word colonialism and of the closely connected terms of empire and imperialism have undergone a profound transformation in the last decades. Until the end of the nineteenth century the word empire or imperialism was generally used in a laudatory and not a pejorative meaning. The Roman Empire had been the model for Western political thought for one thousand years. The Americans at the end of the eighteenth century proudly and hopefully spoke of their empire. The French revolutionaries proclaimed the imperial expansion of their leadership. Modern Western civilization was regarded as superior to other more stagnant civilizations, and to bring higher civilization to less developed countries was considered a praiseworthy enterprise, in spite of the fact that like so many human efforts this too was inextricably mingled with all kinds of corruption and greed. Empire and colonialism always implied dominion and power; and power, whether exercised by "native" or "alien" governments, has a potency for abuse as probably no other relationship has. Yet liberal alien governments—and liberalism means primarily restraint upon, and limitations of, governmental authority—will be more easily controlled by public opinion against abuse of power than illiberal "native" governments.